


the war is won/before it's begun (put on your war paint)

by piggy09



Series: Obscure Word Fics [7]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Baby's first platonic crush, Gen, No there's no Propunk in this sorry just Rachel being gay, Spoilers through teasers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-25
Updated: 2014-03-25
Packaged: 2018-01-17 00:14:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1366861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rachel puts herself together in front of the mirror every morning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the war is won/before it's begun (put on your war paint)

**Author's Note:**

> From a prompt on Tumblr:  
> "Rachel/Sarah | Druxy: Something which looks good on the outside, but is actually rotten inside."
> 
> You want Propunk? You get self-indulgent metaphors. You'll deal, right?

_Every morning Rachel puts on her lipstick in the mirror. It is the color of fresh blood._

Cosima is the latest to be afflicted – Delphine tells Aldous about it with the twitch of her eyes like falling dominos, the lighting of a fuse, the first shaking step away from DYAD as a whole. They’ve already lost her, and if they’re not careful they’ll lose Cosima too.

Something rotten in Rachel says: _good_. Cosima is Aldous’ favorite and the darling of the scientists, who watch her grow up with pride reserved for a firstborn child.

Cosima is not the firstborn child. Her lips are a different kind of red – something like a rust. It amuses Rachel to think of them all as metal, links in a chain perhaps: pull Delphine and you pull Cosima. Pull Cosima and you pull Sarah. Pull Sarah and… _well_.

Aldous’ lips pull down at the corners; his face is all wrinkles. Rachel smiles at him with her untouched lips, her face still smooth with youth, her back unbowed. Her mouth tastes hollow behind her painted lips; her mouth tastes like the prelude to blood.

_Her nails haven’t start chipping, yet – they shine, mocking silver mirrors, from her fingers._

She paints her nails herself, with the slow steady movement of brush over keratin. Few around her get it: _frivolous_ , they whisper, _ornamental_ , _waste waste waste_. Hands at DYAD are tools; they are occasionally weapons. Nails chip. Calluses bloom on palms like footage of decay.

When Rachel was younger she found a book on knights. She rolled their names on her tongues like foreign fruit, the sour citrus of them burning her throat, but after she abandoned those names for the litany of _Aryanna Katja Cosima_ (Sarah) (Sarah Sarah Sarah) the only thing that remained was the idea of _armor_.

You have to build your armor yourself, or there’s no point to it. Rachel sits on her couch and paints over the vulnerable pink of her nails with layers and layers of shining silver, attention half-turned to the television overhead – a child shrieks in laughter and Rachel idly considers the problem of Siobhan Sadler, her nails immaculate but for that one outlier.

That Rachel cannot understand. It is good enough to draw attention to her difference in hair and lipstick, the click of high heels raising her up – why wink at your otherness with every twitching gesture of your fingers? It would remind no one but yourself, when your fingers click endlessly on keyboards; if there is one thing Rachel has never needed, it is a reminder.

So she paints her nails one-by-one, layering messages between each coat – _I have never needed to hold a weapon. I am a beautiful immaculate thing. I am different than you. I am better than you. I am what you could have been, if you had not failed. I am what everyone wants you to be. I am the purest sort of reflection._

_Look at my fingers, shining like magic tricks. Was this your card? Have you realized this is a game, yet?_

(Despite herself she hopes that Sarah gets it. That’s a stupid thought. She knows that Sarah will only see the waste that sits on top of the polish like scum on water.)

_Makeup lines the counter like torture instruments. Or dentist’s tools. Her fingers move delicately over the line before selecting the eyelash curler – one, two, and her eyelashes are long enough to see when she blinks._

It’s all in the eyes, isn’t it?

That’s rhetorical.

Sarah sat across from Rachel in her office like a brick thrown through a window: out of place. The destruction is not in Sarah, but in the chain of events leading to Sarah – on its own, a brick is just a brick.

On her own, Sarah would be just Sarah.

It’s an odd thought. Best to discard it.

In this metaphor, Rachel is the window, all smooth lines and reflections. She couldn’t stop looking at Sarah, the _weight_ of her. Her eyes were so dark and steady. She was a bruise of a person. _I am what you could have been_ , but Rachel couldn’t have been Sarah in any universe.

Maybe she’s not strong enough. Maybe she’s not broken enough. Maybe, maybe, maybe – Rachel hates maybes, wants to nail Sarah down in neat data points and lines of text; _subject does this, subject does that,_ subject is utterly predictable.

Then again, maybe she doesn’t. That’s the problem of Sarah, that gray area. One of many problems of Sarah.

Another problem: she did not look away. It’s all in the eyes, you understand? It’s all right there, and Sarah did not look away. Rachel preened and postured, turned her back and showed her chest, fluttered her own eyelashes unceasingly like all the nervous twitches she’d discarded a long time ago. None of it worked. Sarah was steady and unbroken, and at the end she got up and left.

Rachel sat there like broken glass and watched her go.

_Clothes next. Then heels._

She’s always liked heights. No one ever picked her up as a child but she liked to picture it, when she was huddled in her bed at night. It’s all about the weight of someone underneath you; trusting another person not to let you fall.

A therapist might say she’s spent her whole life chasing that intimacy by going higher and higher, scaling the corporate ladder but taking the elevator. High heels, higher penthouses.

She’d fire them. She has that power now.

Maybe it’s about chasing. Maybe it’s about running. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, _maybe_. Maybe it is about the freedom that comes when you acknowledge that you cannot run – when you know that you would teeter in your heels, when you know that the only option is out the window to shatter on the ground, when you know that every single microscopic piece of you is stamped _property_. There is a freedom in a lack of freedom, and Rachel’s office is like nothing as much as it is like a cage.

Freedom. God. What a stupid thing to run to.

She can’t stop herself from watching Sarah chasing it, though, with a weariness that comes from knowing that she’s going to fail. But Sarah is running like Rachel hasn’t run in years, wanting like Rachel hasn’t wanted in years.

Sarah is desperate, and everything she wants is in Rachel’s hands, between her soft palms, cradled in her frivolousornamentalwaste fingers. Everything.

(Pull Sarah and you pull _everything_. Everyone. Every link in Rachel’s life is attached to the chain of Sarah Manning, and Rachel has nothing at all. How does she do it? How does she do any of it, when she is such a broken mess of a person?)

(“Let them _go_ , Rachel.”

“Tell me how you do it.”

“Do what?”

“Make them love you.”

“Love them in return.”

“Love.”

“Get away from them.”

“Keep running.”

“Smile.”

“Stay angry.”

“Look in mirrors.”

“Any of it. How do you do any of it.”

“Please.”

“I need to know.”

“ _Please_.”)

Rachel has considered every outcome, sitting in her empty apartment, lying in her empty bed, looking at her empty eyes in the mirror. There is no way for Sarah Manning to win.

She has thought of everything. There is _no way_ for Sarah Manning to win.

_The worst part is always looking in the mirror on the way out. The realization settles fresh in Rachel’s stomach every time: no matter what she does, no matter how she makes up her face or what she wears, she will always be the same as them._

_She will always be rotten on the inside._

_Sarah looks at her from the mirror. She does not blink, as Rachel turns to go._

 

**Author's Note:**

> Put on your war paint
> 
> The war is won  
> Before it's begun  
> Release the doves  
> Surrender love
> 
> (Wave the white flag!)  
> \--"The Phoenix," Fall Out Boy


End file.
